Travelogue 4: Marseille
After hearing and reading about the North African market in Marseille (pronounced mar-say), I knew I wanted to go, badly. Marseille has something like 800,000 people living in the city proper, and around 1/4 of them are immigrants from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria (known as the Maghreb, collectively) and this fact alone would be enough to interest me. In addition to a love of international foods, I also spend a lot of time reading about other cultures, history, and other demographic facts and figures. To skip a long non-food discussion, I was very interested in what this city was like – even moreso after hearing the rumours of its gritty, working-class reputation. What was it really like? How do these cultures manifest themselves in French urban life? What interesting things could I find in their market – things I may have never seen before, since Toronto has significantly less North African influence (if any, at all).
Happily, the rumours of Marseille’s dirty port-city vibe are somewhat misguided. Driving into Marseille, it is certainly evident that it is not Paris but, it is not ugly, either. Perhaps one might consider it ugly when compared to Paris’ seemingly permanent antique beauty, but Paris, to me, also feels like it is a fixed idea – whereas Marseille is a living, breathing city. The highway from Aix-en-Provence took us right onto the edge of the ports, and my first reaction to the scenery and layout was that it felt a lot like Toronto: highway along the water, downtown core arranged along one major north-south-ish street, glass buildings and rows upon rows of modern, but hardly fancy, shops and malls, dotted liberally with ethnic restaurants, trash, and commuters trying to get home (as opposed to tourists). It felt disarmingly familiar, in a very pleasant way. Sure, it’s no Paris, but this is a city I could actually relate to, while the big P is like the girl who thinks she’s too pretty for you, and really, you have nothing in common anyway.
Travelogue 3: Cinque Terre
We spent the next day and half recovering from our Parisian walk-a-thon by relaxing at the villa in Cairanne. Somewhere between the time we arrived in France, and the day we left for Italy, I also decided to make ratatouille (first time!). I can’t really remember which day it was, but I was inspired to create this simple French dish, because, on the flight from Toronto to Paris, Air France (not a bad airline, apart from luggage problems) gave us the ability to select movies from a long list of available features. We chose Disney’s Ratatouille – in part because I’ve never seen it, and because I felt I needed a crash course on contemporary French culture (and what better source?)
Travelogue 2: Paris and The Road
Cairanne is about a 7 hour drive from Paris. That’s a long way. In general, I don’t enjoy long car rides – mostly because in Ontario that means seeing a lot of the same scenery for 7 straight hours: farms, highway signage, lonely VIA stations, and truck stops. In France, I was sort of expecting the same, with the slight improvement in that the truck stops et al would be “French” and therefore “new” (to me) at least. Still, 7 hours of anything can be a bit much. My parents were driving us on this excursion, themselves on their way to the northern coast to see war memorials – so make that a 7 hour drive with my parents.
Luckily, I love my parents, and they’re not bad car company. My dad drives fast, and likes to take rest stops frequently to stretch our legs and purchase exotic flavours of Lays potato chips such as Bolognaise and Roast Chicken With Thyme (tastes like Thanksgiving dinner in chip form!). My dad likes chips a lot, you see. I’ve always been keen on Lays’ flavours in other countries ever since I had a flavour in Thailand that haunts me to this day – I couldn’t read the label, but the pictures on it suggested it was some kind of spicy ginger seafood concoction. There were other unidentifiable flavours as well – whatever they were, they were genius. The French lineup also features a flavour named Mustard and Pickles, which I have to guess tastes like spicy dill pickles(?) or something like that. Again, as Anuja detests all things involving vinegar, I would never have been allowed to purchase these if I saw them. Even the smell of the Thanksgiving chips (delicious!) turned her off. You might wonder how I, the intrepid home cook, can deal with someone with such particular taste problems. Sometimes I wonder myself.
Travelogue 1: Provence
As mentioned on previous posts, we spent August 16th to the 28th abroad, sampling foreign cuisines, cultures and lifestyles in France and Italy. By “we” I mean my immediate family (father, mother, brother, sister) and my siblings’ partners (as well as my lovely ladyfriend, Anuja); in a stroke of pure generosity and possibly insanity, my parents decided to finance flights for all of us, as well as the rental of a relatively large villa in Cairanne, a village in Provence.
In case you’ve never heard of Provence, it’s the south-eastern region of France, on the Mediterranean. We weren’t on the sea, however – Cairanne sits just north of Avignon and is firmly in farm country. Or, rather, wine country, as this part of France, like a few others, is highly dependent on their local wine economy. With a population under 1000, I was amazed at how many varieties of wine were offered under the Cairanne label. Plus, they were all, in their way, fantastic wines. I’m not much of a wine-taster, but I can tell the difference between a rich, complex red and a pitcher of grape juice – these were good wines. I will spare you too much wine chatter, though – suffice to say that if you love wines (as my parents do, as well as my sister, since her favourite wines in the world – the wines of Châteauneuf-du-Pape – were a mere 20 minutes away by car) then this region is where you want to be.
No More Microwaves 